I completely agree that they should have shipped his posterior out of there yesterday.
My alleged thouht-process is “We have a SERIOUS problem here. Lew falls asleep on watch. We need to understand and to solve this problem. Either he’s sick or he’s an unreliable SOB. I don’t have the facilities to rule out the first. But I can’t live with a Marine who falls asleep on ewatch in Indian country. Let’s get him somewhere where someone cn find out what’s up and where my men are not imperilled by his incapacity, whether moral or medical.”
As things turned out, viewing it in the most cynical way, they”re just as short-handed with a suicide as they would have been with a medical transfer.
(I was only a civilian hospital chaplain and then an LEO chaplain. I do not have the great honor of having been a military chaplain. But sometimes I think pedistrics comes close.)
“Let’s get him somewhere where someone cn find out what’s up and where my men are not imperilled by his incapacity, whether moral or medical.”
Rewarding bad behavior gets you more bad behavior. Lots of guys would LOVE to be shipped back to Bagram for a physical exam. It usually takes 2-3 days to get there, and after the exam it would take up to a week to get back - so think of it as a 10+ day vacation in a combat zone.
That would make it worthwhile to FAKE falling asleep on guard duty, just for the vacation time!